What Would Lynne Tillman Do? Read Free Page A

fought against the chains of the tape recorder, a new master, asking Warhol many times to stop it. But Ondine continued to let himself be recorded, as did all the others who questioned Drella’s demands in making this novel-book. Maybe they knew they were participating in something new, or interesting, maybe even worthwhile, simply because it was Warhol. Though they struggled with him, they complied. Others may now be horrified by this compliance, believe that everyone in the Factory was manipulated, taken advantage of. They used and were used, perhaps, in every possible sense. But another view is that, given the problems in their lives at the time and their insecurities, which A documents, Warhol offered them something—work or a feeling of significance for that moment or a way to fill time. The tape recorder is on. You are being recorded. Your voice is being heard, and this is history.
    5. What about authorship in a: A Novel ? In Part 2, there’s talk about the typists who are transcribing the tapes, and who, in a way, through errors, mis-hearings, and incorrect spellings, contribute to or create the book with the speakers. It’s the typists’ book. It’sthe tape recorder’s book; it could not exist without it, just as the novel could not have been born without Gutenberg’s press. Or, it’s Ondine’s book, he’s the author of himself, and the protagonist, it’s his 24 hours. Or, and I think it is, it’s Warhol’s artwork, a conceptual and experimental book. Part of Warhol’s work was to regularly produce a blur around authorship.
    6. Warhol dropped the mirror, let it crack into pieces, and instead held a tape recorder up to life. He saw a god in the machine and used as many as he could— a notes the arrival of video, a new toy, to the Factory—and Warhol didn’t fear the loss of authorship to machines, when his hand, literally, wasn’t in or on it; he constructed another kind of artist, who directs machines, people, uses technology, whose imprint was virtual.
    7. a reveals realism as a form of writing, a type of fiction, a genre, not an unmediated, exact replica of life, not a mirror image. Books are not mirrors, and life doesn’t go onto the page like life, but like writing. Warhol’s novel is closer to life, reality, than a realist novel. It’s mediated by the elements I just mentioned—the apparatus, the speakers, the typists, and Warhol’s idea for it—and by the continuous 24-hour frame he wanted to use.
    But Warhol was flummoxed by Ondine, who became exhausted or bored after just 12, so the book is not 24-hours straight. At the end of those 12 hours, Warhol asked Ondine for his last words, and he said, “My last words are Andy Warhol.” There’s a lot of reality in that—and self-consciousness and consciousness. In a , reality is gotten at differently, without any of the codes of realism.
    8. If Warhol had recorded a continuous 24-hours, a: A Novel would have adhered to the classical idea of unity necessary for tragedy, compared with Joyce’s Ulysses , perhaps, which may have been on his mind, since it stands as the 20th century’s representative or exemplary modernist novel. (Bob Colacello says Truman Capote’s singular, brilliant novel, In Cold Blood , was on Warhol’s mind.)
    The second half of a , instead of being continuous time, is a series of fragments, more out of joint, more out of time—more timeless or against time—than Warhol originally planned, and what started as a modernist novel became a postmodernist one. Warhol taped Ondine’s life, whenever he could get it, in all its discontinuous and disjointed glory, or gory, as the wit Dorothy Dean—DoDo in the book—might have put it. He abandoned his original idea, a ’s purity. But the words “pure” and “purity” appear often.
    9. One of the typists was said to have said of the book, “It’s worse than Henry Miller.” Dirtier, she meant. It’s certainly more complex and difficult to read in all senses than